Asian American Studies

October 10, 2014

2014 is a big year for cultural icon Hello Kitty. She turns forty! Her creators, the Sanrio Corporation, are celebrating with a convention, HelloKittyCon, October 30-November 2; a Hello Kitty Reading Day on October 25; and with a special exibhit at Los Angeles's Japanese American Museum, "Hello! Exploring the Supercute World of Hello Kitty," which opens tomorrow, October 11.

The exhibition is co-curated by Christine R. Yano, Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of Hawai`i, Manoa, and author of Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty's Trek across the Pacific. The exhibition examines the colorful history of Hello Kitty and her influence on popular culture. Hello! includes an extensive product survey, with rare and unique items from the Sanrio archives, alongside a selection of innovative contemporary artworks inspired by Hello Kitty and her world. On December 6, Yano will discuss her book at the museum.

Yano recently made news when she revealed in a preview of the exhibition that Hello Kitty is not a cat. "Hello Kitty is not a cat," Yano told the Los Angeles Times. "She's a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She's never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature. She does have a pet cat of her own, however, and it's called Charmmy Kitty."

Here's a short excerpt from the conclusion of Pink Globalization, in which Yano explains Hello Kitty's staying power and importance. Read the entire introduction here. Happy Anniversary, Hello Kitty!

Yet she is always Kitty, even as her guises and appropriations slip and slide the semantic terrain. Indeed, the hypermeanings of Hello Kitty — that is, Hello Kitty as the uber-cute, the uber-feminine, and, for some, the uber-Japan — are part of her fetishization. She exists in her very excess, playing it multiply, exoterically. Throughout this tumble, she still manages to shock through the strength of her iconicity. The only way in which consumers might be continually shocked by a Hello Kitty vibrator or gun or tattoo is when these items overturn the image of the mouthless cat: the items undermine our expectations set in a mode of overdetermined market meanings. Each shock reconditions us to a new equilibrium of expectations, a newly calibrated zone of meaning. This gives new meaning to the name of several Sanrio stores in the United States, "Sanrio Surprise." Such constant newness and shock cause one female punk admirer to declare, "Hello Kitty is rock ’n’ roll!" By that, she points to the edginess that rock occupied in its infancy, but her statement may have been more prescient than she realized.

Indeed, as Hello Kitty wears hats both corporate and individual with equal panache, Sanrio’s cat shares the stage with many pop culture expressions who have moved from the margins to the center. Hello Kitty and the pink globalization she leads may be rock and roll to some, but she is inevitably, unabashedly, irreverently, celebratory Japanese Pop. Pure product, her logo appears seemingly everywhere. Look through the Hello Kitty lens — literally and figuratively — and every point of light transforms into Kitty. This is the wow factor, achieved simply as a low-tech wink that is both artful and artless. Moreover, as pop, she provides the ultimate shifting commercial wink upon ourselves. That wink of Japan’s mouthless cat provides important lessons on the politics, pleasures, and aesthetics of foreign-as-familiar commodity play in this age of global desirings.

December 13, 2012

With the near ubiquity of Korean rapper Psy's video and song "Gangnam Style," most Americans have now had some exposure to the phenomenon of K-Pop, or Korean pop culture. Although K-Pop has been popular and influential in Asia for decades, many Korean artists have had trouble breaking into the US market. In this article in Spin, Kyung Hyun Kim, author of Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global Era, comments on PSY's ability to break into the U.S. market without sacrificing his Koreanness. "The tendency and thinking so far seems to have been that you have to erase Korean identity somehow to achieve success in the U.S. or overseas," he told Spin. "But I think that's been proven wrong with PSY's success. He's engaged in satirical humor — that I didn't know would translate, but apparently it does — and a kind of grotesque body humor, as well, that I always found outrageously funny when I saw him on [Korean] television over the years. I actually didn't even know he was a musician and a producer and a composer himself because he was just a funny face."

Kim is also the editor, with Youngmin Choe, of the forthcoming book The Korean Popular Culture Reader, which we are publishing in October 2013. The comprehensive and richly illustrated book of original essays will go well beyond current K-Pop phenoms like PSY to cover music, film, television, travel, and food. Contributors include Boduerae Kwon, Michelle Cho, Katarzyna J. Cwiertka, Sohl Lee, and Rachel Miyung Joo. The essays are fun and accessible and the book is suitable for courses as well as for fans of K-Pop. Check out an excerpt from the introduction on our Tumblr. We hope you'll keep an eye out for the book next year.

September 26, 2011

ABC-TV’s new series Pan Am is generating a high level of buzz. Entertainment shows preceding the premiere featured not only clips of the show, but also interviews with former stewardesses, infamous author Donald Bain (Coffee, Tea, or Me), and others from the generation characterized as the “swinging 60s.” What these previews suggest is an amalgamated, nostalgized view of an era when – as they say – people knew how to dress, knew how to travel, knew how to treat the service providers. Many Americans of a certain age can sympathize with the source of the nostalgia, given the demeaning experience that commercial air travel has become these days. However, this is nostalgia for specific class and race experiences that many could not share. The nostalgia of Pan Am positions the 1950s and 1960s as an era of domestic “innocence” – when women could still be women and men could still be men. This is painted as an era when lines and lives were more clearly drawn, etching in gender roles as clearly as racial roles.

The innocence does not extend to the international scene. Pan Am situates itself within the Cold War era of espionage, political intrigue, and the airline’s (and some of its personnel’s) role within these. What the show does not depict are the incipient seeds of domestic social change. With black-white race relations simmering not far from the surface, with ethnic revitalization movements waiting in the wings, with feminist movements just underway, the “swinging 60s” of Pan Am skirts the deep national contradictions of the era. Here were working women in that very modern of industries that relied upon them playing traditional hostess roles, even while traveling the world. This included women of Asian ancestry who I wrote about in my book Airborne Dreams. While stewardesses were getting their hair coiffed and girdles checked, other women were beginning to reject those very bodily accoutrements as symbols of patriarchal control. Indeed, the so-called swinging era was riddled with numerous contradictions and ironies if we take off the spectacles of nostalgia.

I was fortunate enough to watch the premiere of ABC-TV’s Pan Am with a group of people (147 strong) whose ties to the era and this television show are extra special – the Pan Am Association - Aloha Chapter in Honolulu, Hawaii. Gathered at the Hawaii Yacht Club for the occasion (some in uniform!), they relished those spectacles of nostalgia affording them yet one more occasion to shout out, “Pan Am lives!” “Gone but not forgotten!” They scrutinized ABC-TV’s show for inaccuracies (color of uniform, length of stewardess’s hair, use of a Jetway during that period). They cheered at depictions of bygone icons – the Pan Am building in New York with its rooftop helipad, even the pilfering of fancy food and drink in First Class by stewardesses (one overheard comment: “Now it’s getting real!”). Pan Am reassures them all that at least for one television season on Sunday nights, their display of loyalty to the airline of a past era – “the best years of their lives!” – may be shared by viewers nationwide.

June 10, 2011

We had a great time at the 2011 Association for Asian American Studies Conference in New Orleans, LA, May 18th-21st. Here are photos of some of the authors who stopped by our booth and from Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu's book launch party.

September 20, 2010

Varietyreports today that ABC has greenlighted a new series to revolve around the pilots and stewardesses of 1960s Pan Am. Reporter Michael Schneider writes that the show will focus on "what it meant to be a flight attendant in the go-go days of flight travel." We wonder if it will reveal the ugly sexism and racial stereotyping behind the glamour. In her book Femininity in Flight, Kathleen Barry revealed the many indignities that women working in the airline industry had to endure in the 1950s and 60s: weigh-ins, forced retirements upon marriage, skimpy uniforms and sexual abuse by passengers. She details the important role of unions in changing most of these policies and turning the sexy stewardess into the safety-conscious flight attendant. In her forthcoming book Airborne Dreams, Christine R. Yano tells another Pan Am story, that of second-generation Japanese-American women ("Nisei") recruited to staff Pan Am's Asia routes. They were ostensibly hired for their language skills, but since many of them hardly spoke any Japanese, their more important role was to bring an "exotic" appeal to the routes and play into stereotypes about Asian women. They endured all the same indignities of other flight attendants; one woman Yano interviewed remembered the pilot-conducted girdle checks. Now there's something that should be featured on the new show!

May 04, 2010

Publishers Weekly has given a Starred Review to Amitava Kumar's forthcoming book A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb. The reviewer writes that "Kumar’s searching and humane account of the global consequences of the
U.S. 'war on terror' gets behind the rhetoric and state public relations
campaigns in a brisk but thoughtful narrative." The reviewer concludes: "An arresting and heartrending work of public protest and valuable social
analysis, this work contributes forcefully to a subtle, human-scaled
accounting of 21st-century geopolitics." The book will be available in August, along with Kumar's first novel, Nobody Does the Right Thing. Check out Kumar's website or follow him on Twitter.

March 03, 2010

Scott Jaschik interviews anthropologist Nancy Abelmann at Inside Higher Ed today. Abelmann, the author of The Intimate University: Korean American Students and the Problems of Segregation, answers questions about how Korean Americans' experience in universities differs from that of other ethnic groups, the role of family expectations and religion, and the issue of segregation. She says in the end, professors need to "make our classes meaningful venues in which students can indeed grow
and prepare themselves for a transformed and transforming world."

August 31, 2009

Anthropologist Shalini Shankar, author of Desi Land: Teen Culture, Class, and Success in Silicon Valley, was interviewed for Sunday's DNA Mumbai. Between 1999 and 2001, Shankar spent many months “kickin’ it” with Desi teenagers at three Silicon Valley high schools, and she has since followed their lives and stories. Shankar spoke with DNA Mumbai about her experiences with the teens and what she learned in spending time with them. "I was expecting desi teens to be more angst-ridden, but I was pleasantly surprised....I have to admit I really liked them. They were fun and connected to their families. They weren't the kind of teenagers who were embarrassed to be seen with their parents or loathing community events."

July 17, 2009

Today's New York Times "City Room" blog has a fascinating post about a recently-found notebook filled with Chinese characters, apparently a crib sheet for use by an illegal immigrant. As Estelle T. Lau wrote in her book Paper Families: Identity, Immigration Administration, and Chinese Exclusion, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made the Chinese the first immigrant group officially excluded from the United States. Chinese Americans took advantage of the system’s loophole: children of U.S. citizens were granted automatic eligibility for immigration. The result was an elaborate system of "paper families," in which U.S. citizens of Chinese descent claimed fictive, or "paper," children who could then use their kinship status as a basis for entry into the United States. This subterfuge necessitated the creation of crib sheets outlining genealogies and providing village maps and other information that could be used during immigration processing. The newly found crib sheet apparently belonged to Chung Fook Wing, who attempted to gain entry into the U.S. in 1923 by pretending to be the son of George Sing of Yonkers. His crib sheet apparently worked and he was allowed into the country, but seventeen years later on a drug possession charge and the notebook was found in a search of his papers at a New York City opium den. The notebook then found its way to the National Archives in New York City, where it languished unstudied until quite recently.